CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Murray Perahia

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Saturday, November 3rd, 2007 at 8:00 PM

Murray Perahia, Piano

BACH Partita No. 4 in D Major, BWV 828
BEETHOVEN Sonata No. 15 in D Major, Op. 28, "Pastoral"
BRAHMS Six Pieces for Piano, Op. 118
CHOPIN Etude in A-flat Major, Op. 25, No. 1, "Aeolian Harp"
CHOPIN Etude in C-sharp Minor, Op. 10, No. 4, "Torrent"
CHOPIN Ballade in A-flat Major, Op. 47

Encores:
SCHUMANN Traumes Wirren from Fantasiestücke, Op. 12, No. 7
SCHUBERT Impromptu in E-flat Major, D.899, No. 2

Program Notes:

By Bernard Jacobson

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH Partita No. 4 in D Major, BWV 828
Born March 21, 1685, in Eisenach, Germany; died July 28, 1750, in Leipzig.

The Fourth Partita was composed probably in 1726 and, after separate publication during the 1720s, eventually formed Part I of the Clavier-Übung, or Keyboard Exercise, published by Bach in 1731. The Partita received its first Carnegie Hall performance in Chamber Music Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) on November 3, 1941, with Ralph Kirkpatrick, piano.

Together with his English and French Suites for keyboard, partitas for solo violin, and suites for solo cello and for orchestra, Johann Sebastian Bach’s keyboard partitas constitute prime examples of a formal scheme that dominated instrumental music in the first half of the 18th century, before the Baroque style gave way to the sonata forms of the new Classical manner. “Partita” is another name for what in French and English is usually called a “suite,” a form that grew up alongside the prototypes of symphony or sonata as we know them, but from different origins: it evolved out of the secular and frequently dance-related branch of renaissance music. “Sinfonia” again, the name Bach frequently gave to the opening movements of these works, was a term largely interchangeable in the 18th century with “overture”; and it was the full title “ouverture avec la suite,” or “overture with what follows,” that was shortened into the more manageable “suite.”

The opening movement in the present case is, again, a classic French-style overture consisting of a stately, slowish introduction in largely dotted rhythms (alternating long and short notes) followed by an athletic main section in a fluid 9/8 meter. These two elements are so traditional in the genre that, as in many of his works, Bach did not feel the need to head them with specific tempo markings. Lovers of Brahms, for whom the theme of the fast section may sound intriguingly familiar, will be amused by Sir Donald Tovey’s characteristically mischievous comment in his essay on the later composer’s chamber music. Discussing the scherzo of the A-Major Piano Quartet, he remarks: “A hundred and twenty years earlier Bach had impudently plagiarized Brahms’s main theme in the overture to his Fourth Partita in the Clavierübung; no doubt with Brahms’s full pardon.”

In “what follows,” Bach this time adds two movements to the four “official” dances of the traditional partita or suite, which were the Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, and Gigue. The additions are a jaunty aria that sounds more Italian than French—its rhythms suggest a parallel with the concerto in explicitly Italian style that would be included in Part II of the Clavier-Übung a few years later—and a flowing minuet, titled “Menuet” in French.


LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Sonata No. 15 in D Major, Op. 28, “Pastoral”
Born December 16, 1770, in Bonn; died March 26, 1827, in Vienna.

Composed in 1801, the “Pastoral” Sonata received its Carnegie Hall premiere on January 7, 1893, with Ignacy Jan Paderewski, piano.

The notion that a Classical sonata has to consist of four movements dies hard, but historically speaking it is inaccurate. Of the 16 officially published sonatas that Beethoven wrote before this one—the two contained in Op. 49 were composed around 1796 but published much later—only seven followed that pattern. Furthermore, the three sonatas immediately preceding Op. 28 represent early steps in the re-ordering and drawing together of traditional multi-movement structures that Beethoven was to take to its logical conclusion in some of his last sonatas and string quartets.

Against this background, the sonata known unofficially (whether because of its gentle atmosphere or for rhythmic or harmonic reasons) as the “Pastoral” constitutes, at least in its outward aspect, a striking return to traditional values: two fast outer movements, the first in sonata form and the other a rondo, are separated by a regulation slow movement and an equally “standard” scherzo, repeated after a central trio section. Even within these conventional-looking outlines, however, Beethoven gives us some far from conventional music.

The Andante, in particular, its main theme evocatively contrasting continuous legato in the right hand with a pointedly staccato accompaniment, is an ingenious blend of ternary (A-B-A) and variation forms. More broadly, a pervasive sense of harmonic stasis prevails throughout, and especially in the outer movements. This feels like a romantic sonata, but its manner is as far removed from the explosive tonal dynamism that was to inform Beethoven’s “middle-period” style in the “Waldstein” and “Appassionata” sonatas three or four years later as it is from the firm classicism of his first essays in the genre back in the 1790s.


JOHANNES BRAHMS Six Piano Pieces, Op. 118
Born May 7, 1833, in Hamburg; died April 3, 1897, in Vienna.

Composed in 1893, the Six Piano Pieces, Op. 118, received their first complete Carnegie Hall performance on November 10, 1944, with Ray Lev, piano.

To anyone looking at it in 1853, the 20-year-old Brahms’s output would have seemed to give promise of a massive body of large-scale piano works. Of what we now know as his first five opus numbers, three are attached to piano sonatas, and another to a scarcely less ambitious Scherzo for the instrument, with a few songs, published the following year as Opus 3, as the only interlopers. Yet Brahms was in fact to turn in a quite different direction where solo music for his own instrument—as distinct from the concerto genre—was concerned.

After the Scherzo and the three sonatas, the only big structures among the remaining solo piano works he was to publish are half a dozen sets of variations. For the rest, aside from some dances and technical exercises, the Brahms piano output is spread over seven sets containing a total of 34 individual pieces, few of them more than five minutes in duration, and many of them not merely concise but intensely intimate in expression.

Among these, the Six Pieces gathered in Op. 118 demonstrate that, within the limits of sheer size he set himself, there is no diminution in the complexity of Brahms’s thought. On the contrary, it is expressed in these finely honed small masterpieces with more concentration than ever. Nor does “smallness” rule out grandeur: for in the last analysis size, in artistic terms, is more a matter of proportion than of mere brute length or loudness.

There is telling evidence, moreover, of large-scale planning across the individual pieces in the set. At the end of the first piece, an Intermezzo that sweeps along in a passionate A minor, a final A-major chord provides a link to the first melody note—C-sharp—of the second Intermezzo that follows. This A-major piece is one of the two longest in the set, expanding from its placidly flowing first section to embrace a characteristically subtle rhythmic expansion in the middle. Next comes an urgently paced Ballade in G minor, built out of essentially four-measure phrases that are, again in quintessentially Brahmsian fashion, into much more interesting fives.

No. 4 is an F-minor Intermezzo whose agitato character is powered by persistent syncopations and the interplay of triplet and duplet rhythms. Brahms’s inexhaustible rhythmic inventiveness comes to the fore again in No. 5, an F-major Romanze: here the 6/4 grouping of twice-three quarter-notes is interspersed with measures that scan in three groups of two, and when, after a contrasting middle section in 2/2 meter, this happens for the last time, at the very end, it is delayed till the fifth measure of the phrase instead of the fourth.

Emotional concentration is taken to new lengths in the concluding E-flat-minor Intermezzo, whose obsessive, involuted theme cannot be restrained from obtruding itself even on the would-be heroics of the contrasting middle section in the major mode.

These clues are offered as modest signposts for the listener. But ultimately they serve only as reminders of the central factor that gives these wondrous creations a power out of all proportion to their size: the skill of a mature and remarkably resourceful composer, brought to bear with no less intensity here than in the largest of his orchestral or choral works.


FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN Etude in A-flat Major, Op. 25, No. 1; Etude in C-sharp Minor, Op. 10, No. 4; Ballade No. 3 in A-flat Major, Op. 47
Born March 1, 1810, in ¯elazowa Wola, Poland; died October 17, 1849, in Paris.

The 12 Etudes of Op. 10 were composed between 1829 and 1832, and the 12 of Op. 25 between 1832 and 1836. The A-flat-Major Ballade was sketched in 1840 and completed in the following year; it was probably heard for the first time in public when Chopin played it in February 1842 in a recital he gave with the singer Pauline Viardot.

The works on tonight’s program received their Carnegie Hall premieres as follows: the A-flat-Major Etude on November 9, 1895, with Ignacy Jan Paderewski; the C-sharp-Minor Etude on December 3, 1904, with Josef Hofmann; and the Ballade No. 3 on January 23, 1892, Ignace Jan Paderewski.

In 1831, when his teacher Joseph Elsner protested, “Your genius should not cling to the piano: operas must make you immortal,” Chopin’s reply was uncompromising in its emphasis on his “perhaps too audacious but noble wish and intention to create for myself a new world.” In due course, though less than 18 years remained to him for the task, Chopin created that world, and the piano has never been the same since.

Never has a composer been more profoundly identified than Chopin with the spirit of an instrument. His absorption in the piano is illustrated most directly in the 24 Etudes and the 24 Preludes. In these, and preeminently of course in the Etudes, he was more closely than ever concerned with the nature of the instrument itself and the problems it posed. In the A-flat-Major Etude of Op. 25, composed in 1836, the topic is the quintessentially pianistic one of the interplay between melodic theme and accompaniment, the latter being dissolved into arpeggios. The C-sharp-Minor Etude of Op. 10 belongs appropriately enough in a set dedicated to Liszt, for it is a piece that makes formidable demands on the player’s virtuosity, alternating rapid 16-note motion and staccato accompanying chords in breathtaking fashion between the two hands.

Together with the four Scherzos and at any rate the second and third of the three Sonatas, the four great Ballades stand as Chopin’s most substantial and individual contributions to the literature of his chosen instrument. Like its three companion works, the Third Ballade is set in a flowing compound meter, 6/8 in this instance. It opens without preamble with a theme whose seventh and eighth notes—constituting a whole-tone descent from a weak part of the measure onto a strong beat—turns out to be the fundamental thematic element throughout the piece. This theme, in the words of the composer Alan Rawsthorne, “has elegance, grace and charm. It is suave and altogether delightful.” All the more remarkable, stemming from so unassuming a source, is the brief yet grandly majestic restatement of this theme that, after developments of the utmost subtlety, precedes the Ballade’s coruscating conclusion.

Copyright © 2007 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Bernard Jacobson writes frequently about classical music and is the author of
A Polish Renaissance, part of the 20th-Century Composers series published
by Phaidon Press.

Murray Perahia, Piano
In the more than 30 years that he has been performing on the concert stage, American pianist Murray Perahia has become one of the most sought-after and cherished artists of our time. On March 8, 2004, he was awarded an honorary KBE by Her Majesty the Queen of England, in recognition of his outstanding service to music.

Murray Perahia performs in all of the major international music centers and with every leading orchestra. He is the Principal Guest Conductor of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, with whom he has recorded Bach concertos and toured as conductor and pianist throughout the United States, Europe, Japan, and South East Asia. Recently, Mr. Perahia embarked on an ambitious project to edit the complete Beethoven sonatas for the Henle Urtext Edition. He also produced and edited numerous hours of recordings of recently discovered master classes by the legendary pianist Alfred Cortot, which resulted in the highly acclaimed Sony CD release, Alfred Cortot: The Master Classes.

Mr. Perahia has a wide and varied discography. His most recent solo recording features Franz Schubert’s late piano sonatas (D. 958, 959, and 960). His recording of Frédéric Chopin’s complete Etudes, Op. 10 and Op. 25, garnered him both the 2003 Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Soloist Performance and Gramophone’s 2003 award for Best Instrumental Recording. His recording of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations received two Grammy nominations and won the 2001 Gramophone Award for Best Instrumental Recording.

Mr. Perahia is an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Music and the Royal Academy of Music, and he holds an honorary doctorate from Leeds University.